The weekend

When: Our last Social Innovation Camp was held in Edinburgh, Scotland from Friday 17th – Sunday, 19th June 2011

Where: The Informatics Forum, Edinburgh, Scotland

What:

We want to connect people with ideas to people with the resources to make things happen.

From a big open Call for Ideas, the Social Innovation Camp judges has selected seven ideas to be developed at our weekend Camp.

We’ll be hosting around 100 people for two and a half days to come and work with us.

It’s an ambitious goal, but at the end of the weekend we want to see new relationships which can grow to become projects to enact real change. A couple of months down the line, it would be great to see socially-oriented, innovative start-ups using the social web which can point to the Social Innovation Camp as the place where it all started.

How it works

The Camp is inspired by the Barcamp concept bringing developers together for one weekend to encourage creative collaboration on common problems. This is a little bit like an ‘unconference’ – a creative and inclusive version of the traditional conference format where receiving information in a top-down fashion from a selected couple of speakers is replaced with a big creative conversion between a diverse group of people all gathered in the same place to discuss and create interesting innovations.

Further details on the programme may be found here – expect a little bit of structure and a lot of space to do your own thing.

The final aim is for participants to organise themselves into seven teams around our seven ideas and build a prototype in just two days. This will include working out the nature of the problem in hand, hacking together some software to do the job, as well as thinking about how to sustain the idea and create a community of users.

By the end of the weekend, we’re looking for teams to prove the potential of the ideas they’ve been working on and to demonstrate this in the final pitching competition for our judges.